Sad news for players of ARK: Survival Evolved as it now uses BattlEye for online play, but the great news is the developers of ARK have confirmed BattlEye is coming to Linux and they are throwing money to help it happen. This will also be good news for Arma 3 players.

QuoteJust wanted to chime in here. You're absolutely right to feel frustrated and upset at us due to the latest patch and what it meant for our current Linux and Mac Players wanting to play on servers that have enabled BattlEye. I sincerely apologize that we weren't ready to have it deployed for Mac and Linux too.

We're still working diligently on bringing it to Mac and Linux and we will have it available as soon as we can, we're actually specifically paying the guys over at BE extra money right now to ensure that Mac and Linux are finished as soon as possible.

I get that a fair few ARK players on Linux will be annoyed by this, but I hope they can see the bigger picture. They are a fair few people raging at the developers in that forum topic which is sad, because the developers themselves say it should be done in a few days.

Arma 3 also uses BattlEye for online play on most of their servers, and it limits are ability to play online in their experimental Linux port that should be getting updated soon. They spoke about possible BattlEye support before too, but now it looks like it will be much easier for them as well.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Let's try some math! If 9% of the players are on Mac/Linux and nearly 3 million copies have been sold (closer to 2.7 million at the end of 2015). That's roughly 243,000 clients that can't connect. At $20 each that's roughly 5 million dollars worth of players can't connect.

We looked at the numbers internally, and it was part of our decision: We do not have that many sales on Mac/Linux combined, and the number of active players on our official servers is really, really low from those demographics. Like orders of magnitudes less.

We actually do a lot of work internally to support a very small number of overall purchases/players of the game on Mac/Linux, compared to our overall sales.

Kind of a bummer, but yeah.

They actually seem to don't care much about us lol.
Another:

Developer

Random Steam UserWell you lost this user to your "urgent" decision and will be asking for a refund.

Honestly it sounds pretty rational, I'm glad they're actually working on a solution rather than just completely ignoring the community like a few other devs I could mention. Granted, if the game was finished I think a rage would be more justified, that said I understand how frustrating that must be if you play the game frequently. However, as the boss points out, the game is still in early access, so one should always be prepared for things to break when the devs are making major changes.

Edit: After reading the comment below, I will admit I've changed my mind somewhat ^^; I forgot that this is one of those Rust style games where things can happen to you and your stuff after logging off; add this to the reasons I don't feel like trying those kinds of games. But yeah, that's kinda F'ed.

They should of waited until it was working for mac/linux.
The game requires you to log in and take care of your dinos everyday. If not they literally starve to death. And some dino's take 10hours or more to tame, and for that 10 hours someone must be logged in constantly with it to feed it and look after it. Some people have literally 1000's of hours invested and everything they got could be dead/gone after a few days of not being able to log in. Even more so if they are on a pvp server. I really feel for the affected people. You really get attached to some of ya dinos and feel a real sense of loss when 1 dies.

If they really couldn't wait they should of warned users before hand so they could organize someone else to care for their dinos and bases. Or make some other arrangements.

I hope you're right. Arma 3 is something I have been chomping at the bit to get, but I'm holding out until they get closer and hopefully make the port "official". If this is true and it will work with Eon, that's one of the major hurtles done...

ARK's Linux support is so piss-poor that after 43h of playtime, I finally gave up when yesterday, I tried to log in and without success, due to Battleye. Thanks but no thanks.
The worst part is that the game got advertised (don't know if it still does) as FULL STEAMOS SUPPORT and FULL STEAM CONTROLLER SUPPORT!!! Nope, linux version is missing a hellova lot of features and optimizations when in comparison to the Win brethren. Also SteamController support is a joke - they simply implemented xbox360pad support and slapped the default config on it.
Very poor going from the devs in my opinion... but that's just my opinion. Rant's over.

I can't totally agree with everything there. Sure their are effects missing such as sky, ground clutter, the wet sand effects, and more, but the game is still beautiful. My friend running Windows with a 780 has to leave the sky turned all the way down, shadows turned down, ground clutter turned off, etc or it kills his performance. I have friends running it on a GTX 660 with acceptable results under Linux ( not saying at all that Linux performs better than windows, it doesn't ). This game requires some real hardware to run and even once it's released it will require some real hardware to run with good frame rates.

No idea about the controller support as it's a FPS and I'm only a keyboard and mouse guy when it comes to shooters...

The game is more impressive graphically than any other game I have seen under Linux by a long shot, even without the additional features. I'm hoping they will add them but they are not deal breakers by any means in my opinion...

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